The present invention first relates to a method for transmitting a data packet in a network according to the preamble of patent claim 1. In addition, the invention relates to a method for configuring a data packet in a network according to the preamble of patent claim 4.
Data packets can be configured in different ways. Data packets frequently provide a header field containing header data relevant for transmission and a user field, wherein at least one data field containing header data of a first header data type is provided in the header field, and wherein the data packet is transmitted by a transmitter device to a receiver device. Data packets are usually transmitted in a network. The network may involve the Internet, for example. In such a case, the data packets are IP packets, in particular. These are data packets according to the Internet protocol.
The data packets are transmitted between a transmitter device and a receiver device, whereby such devices may involve router devices, for example.
Router devices in an IP transmission pathway often require information on the local processing of the packet. The information may be, for example, routing policy, encryption policy, virtual context, and the like. This information cannot be transmitted, for example, in the standard IP header v4 according to RFC 791 without additional, optional fields.
The use of optional fields in IP headers, however, is very impractical, since it leads to an extreme deterioration in router performance due to the loss of the hardware accelerator.
Such a problem is typically avoided by clearly expensive and complicated methods such as VLAN (Virtual Local Area Network), MPLS (Multiprotocol Label Switching), VPLS (Virtual Private LAN Service) and the like.